It is common in practice to have a grouped set of articles, such as beverage containers or the like, held together by shrink film in order to be able to prevent the set from shifting or from coming undone during a transport. Bundles comprising four, six, or more containers, for example, are known from the prior art. Such bundles continue to be one of the most frequent variants of sales units for beverage container or bottles of PET plastic. It is therefore desirable to assemble such bundles as quickly as possible without interruption of individual process steps in order to be able to achieve a high throughput.
Apparatuses and methods are already known that unwind the packaging material or, as the case may be, the shrink film from one or more rolls in order to supply the material to the bundles. Hereupon, the individual bundles or, as the case may be, the particular articles provided for the bundle, are wrapped into the packaging material. The unwinding of the packaging material from the roll can be carried out by machine. Apparatuses are known, which, for example, extract the packaging material from the roll by way of rollers, with the particular roll being meanwhile rotatingly moved. After the supply of packaging material on a roll is depleted, the roll in question has to be exchanged by or replaced with a new roll. This involves an undesirable interruption of the process of assembling the bundles.
A method and an apparatus by which new reels can be supplied and depleted reels can be exchanged are known, for example, from DE 40 40 545 A1. The apparatus as known from the DE patent application has a plurality of reels arranged side by side for supplying strip material. The core of the reels is in each case positioned on a common pin. A beginning section of the strip material is previously brought into contact with a roller, which extracts the strip material from the particular reel and guides it in a downward direction away from the apparatus. In apparatuses according to the DE patent application, the reels have to be manually positioned on a common pin. In practice, it would be desirable to have apparatuses and methods by which flat material and/or film material can be provided interruption-free, where the apparatuses or, as the case may be, the methods, are to a large extent automated.
An apparatus is known from DE 10 2004 026 312 A1 with a foil splicing station where the foil web of a new roll that is mounted into a packaging machine is transferred with the support of a holding device to a sealing device. The holding device can, in particular, be formed as a manually operable clamping strip, with the aid of which a foil beginning can be extracted from a new roll and provided to a transfer device, which can supply the foil beginning to a sealing device, by which the foil beginning is heat-sealed to a foil web that is already located in the packaging machine. The clamping strip is described there as an implement that is easy to handle for bringing the foil web into an appropriate position. The clamping strip is loose, however, that is, it is not linked to the machine or to the sealing device.
DE 42 21 052 A1 discloses an apparatus for handling reels formed from wound webs of material that are primarily intended to be used as packaging material in packaging machines. For this purpose, the reels are picked up, transported, and deposited at the packaging machine by reel conveyors, which are movable above a processing machine with the aid of a reel holder engaging one reel at a time. The reel holder is to be variably adjustable relative to the reel conveyor such that it serves to bring reels to any position and to deposit them there.
In view of the known apparatuses and method, it can be regarded as a primary object of the present invention to provide an improved apparatus and an accordingly improved method for handling flat material and/or film material wound onto rolls, by which apparatus and method the flat material and/or film material can be supplied with only brief interruptions or, ideally, at least approximately interruption-free, and which apparatus and method moreover enable a high degree of automation.